Solutions architect for live production at Norwegian broadcaster TV 2, Svein Henning Skaga, started out in audio at his local radio station as a DJ. However, he quickly found more affinity with the technical side of broadcast than with his initial role, spinning the decks.
He chose to train as an audio and broadcast engineer and spent a large and formative part of his early career in radio.
“I spent 15 years at P4 radio, part of the Nordic Entertainment Group (NENT) here in Norway,” Skaga says. “At that time, P4 covered sports quite extensively, so I spent much of my time working as a technician and producer at sports events all over the world – Olympics, skiing championships, handball and football championships – and lots more.”
At the time, Skaga was based in Oslo, but he and his wife were looking for a route home to Bergen, which led him to TV 2: “A position came up as a technical operations manager, which I thought would be a good opportunity to learn some new skills. For the first few years in TV 2 I didn’t work much with audio at all; I just tried to learn as much as I could about video and synchronisation, and all the other stuff you don’t get exposed to in radio.”
Breaking into TV
Eventually Skaga’s experience in sports audio broadcasting was to prove invaluable: “TV 2 had broadcast rights for the Olympics in Sochi and in Rio,” he recalls. “Based on my sports experience in radio I was sent there as part of the operations teams. The biggest job there was actually mixing the mix-minus. Although we used a lot of remote production, we didn’t want presenter audio going to Norway and back again, so I took care of the local in-ear mixes. There was a lot to do, with presenters at several different arenas.”
Skaga notes that the role described would probably not be a local one now, as with progress in virtualisation the console would most likely be traveling to the event alone.
“With UHD there is an expectation of a better audio experience too, but it’s quite a demanding thing to have enough skilled operators to handle all this stuff, especially as it’s still relatively immature”
Skaga’s audio roots have come into play plenty of times since then, including when specifying infrastructure and tools for TV 2’s biggest recent shift – a move to new buildings and a new IP-based infrastructure.
The move happened in 2017, at TV 2’s Bergen and Oslo sites. “We decided to go entirely IP,” says Skaga. “Video over IP especially was still a bit immature at that time, particularly in standardisation, but audio was ready. We had the AES67 standard established, so we decided to build a whole new audio infrastructure based on Lawo technologies.”
The install at Bergen included eight Lawo mc²56 desks in the control rooms, a Nova 73 as a central router and processing unit, and eight VisTool virtual UI screens: “We built a dedicated network for audio and video, which Nevion helped us with. One of the big ideas at that time was to build a network that united the Bergen and Oslo facilities as one network so the user would have access to all audio and video across both sites without having to think of tie lines and so on.”
At the time the 2110 spec wasn’t ready, so TV 2 went with TR04, which combined SMPTE 2022 -6 and AES67. “Now we are working on the 2110 transition. As we use AES67 already, the audio is already 2110 compliant. We just need to change our video end points.”
To read the full artice please visit: https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/ring-of-change-tv2s-svein-henning-skaga-on-the-growth-of-audio-and-a-career-in-sound/
One of the Lawo mc²56 consoles, fully assimilated into the all-IP facilities at TV 2, Bergen
